Blue Suede Shoes

Remember my old shoes? The ones that were disenegrating, and had to be laced up so tight to fit that the sides of the shoes almost overlapped each other? (I inherited my dad's incredibly narrow foot.) They're no more.

I bought a new pair of shoes today at Carolina Place Mall. They're technically running shoes, but they fit me really well because they're narrow. (Finally, I find a shoe that's naturally narrow. They pretty much don't sell shoes in narrow sizes. They have TONS of wide-size shoes, but no narrow ones.)

Oh yeah. And they're blue. (Well, not outlandishly blue. You have to see them to know what I mean.)

Speed Update

I've been really busy over the past week, and I've got plenty to do tonight. I haven't updated in so long that I feel that I need to make a quick, list-like update.

My computer's finished in TechConnect club, and it works. Gotta figure out whether i'm gonna buy/install a video card or not, though (the current video is integrated into the motherboard, and I can upgrade via an AGP slot).

I've been loaded down with homework over the past week. It let up over this weekend, but I've put it all off till today, so tonight won't be fun.

The whole Oddysey of the Mind thing will probably sort itself out. I haven't gotten a call from a team, but there's no given deadline, and the people are meeting Monday afternoon to sort through everyone who doesn't have a team yet.

I'm currently 2nd place in Fantasy Football, 4-2. This week isn't looking so great so far, but I may just pull it off.

My dad and I have been trying to install a new Wireless NIC into my mom's laptop to get her laptop to work, but we can't get it to fit in the slot yet. We might just have someone take a look at it.

We're gonna have to figure out how to get together at the Renaissance Festival soon (me, Clare, Meghan, etc.). It'll be a mess with all of our crazy schedules and parents, but we'll figure it out. Sunday seems to be the best day to do it.

I did okay at the two math competitions this past week. My mandelbrot individual score was not particularly impressive. On the team proof round, I wrote down something embarassingly wrong, but did pretty well overall. At the Panthers Numbers Crunch Qualifier, the questions were kinda funky, and we were only able to get 3rd out of 6 competing teams. The good news is that that qualifies us for the final round at the Panther's Stadium during school on November 10th.

I'm gonna update my blog template soon with more webcomic links. I use my blog now as a "click all the links open in tabs to check my stuff" thing. (Though I suppose I could set them all up ina bookmark folder and "open in tabs. In fact, I'm gonna do that as soon as I have some time with all of my homework done.)

Currently on the back burner: Studying for A+. Studying C++. Building the website. Entering this Endangered Species Poster contest I heard about through Envirothon. Applying for NCSSM. Finishing Myst IV.

Speaking of Myst IV, I've been finally playing it this weekend. I should really finish it, so I can buy the limited edition of Myst V before they all get sold. Of course, I'm assuming that I'll wait to buy Myst V until I finish Myst IV.

I'm all out of things to say today.

Radio

You know what one of the things that I hate about the radio is? They never tell you what the name of a song is. When you want to know the name of the song, the best you can do is try to catch a few lyrics and google them. Which rarely works. (Of course, there's that Song-411 service i've heard about, but i'm not gonna go into that.)

It happened to me about 3 weeks ago when I was riding home from school with my mom, listening to Lite-102.9. There was this song I heard many times before with this famous saxaphone line, and this great guitar riff. I wanted to know what the name of the song was so I could download it, but my mom couldn't remember. It stank. (Come to think of it, I coulda looked through the top-25 played list for the station on iTunes, but i forgot about it.)

Luckily for me, she suddenly remembered the name of the song today, and now I have it on iTunes. It's Baker Street by Gerry Rafferty. Such a cool song.

Thoughts on Last Year's English Exam

I remember this odd feeling at the end of last year's double-block English exam. (Ms. Anliker turned our back-to-back exams for English 1 and Freshman Seminar into one, 4-hour-long, English exam from Hades.)

The last part of the exam was writing down examples of literary devices in this movie (tv series, really) that we were watching during the year. As soon as I got to it, I had this odd feeling of closure. That this was the end. That once I came up with 10 literary devices from "Taken", I never had to worry about Freshman English or Ms. Anliker again. (Well, until I want her to write me a letter of reccomendation for NCSSM. But she explicitly said to me that she wanted to anyways.)

As I turned in my exam, I felt like saying something profound. (Like "It is finished.") One of the weirdest feelings I've ever had.

late-nite posting

I miss the times during the summer when I could post to lj during the wee hours of the morning.

My mom's in New York with her sister, staying with her nephew (my cousin) for a week. So it's just us 3 guys in the house. (Scary.)

Life has been so... tiresome over the past week or so. I haven't gotten 8 hours of sleep per night in days.

I'm gonna feel bad about going to piano lessons tomorrow and not having practiced for the past 5 days. But it's not like i could do much. I mean, I could have made time to do it, but then i'd be feeling even crappier.

There's been so much homework over the past week... it's been crazy.

On a much better note, I'm way on Mr. Fisher's (physics teacher) good side. I've been doing really well in his class. He showed off one of my creative assignments to the other classes (a vector scavenger hunt to find the stuffed animal monkey mascot, with a kidnapping backstory). So, that clears 2 out of 3 teachers i'm going to ask to write letters of reccomendation for NCSSM. Ironic how I'm only having to worry about math teachers for letters of reccomendation.

I gotta make sure I don't miss the next Math Club meeting. I probably will, with my memory, organizational skills, and current mental state. (Then again, it may be the Duke Math Meet, in which case they will probably remind me about it.)

I'm liking my C&E class more and more, now that we're getting out of the history part of it.

I still play too much online poker. ($540k! w00t!)

I can't wait for the weekend. Enough said.

Fantasy Football: 2-2

Blah.

I had a mediocre week, and scored 55 points.

The person who I was playing against, who never logged in during the week, scored 80 points.

I was expecting better after my blow-out last week against Frank. Looks like I'm gonna be going back to the drawing board.

Swamped

Apparently Roshan's been going through the same things I have.

Sorry for not posting too much lately. Between school, homework, and way too much online poker, I haven't found the time nor the motive to post.

My fantasy football team's been doing well. I demolished Frank this past week 115-64. Lucky me, I had both S. Alexander and D. Bledsoe on my team, which gave me 50 points just between the two of them. I was worried over the weekend about having to eat my words of trashtalking that I was laying on Frank, but it all turned out ok.

Oh, I might as well give a shout out (to the 2 people who read my blog.....) to Will and Clare's webcomc at http://mediocres.keenspace.com/, and to all the kind folks at TripleJack Poker at http://www.triplejack.com. (That's right, Roshan. I'm cordually inviting you to follow both links.)